drat and blast

There are more people alive on the planet than have ever lived and died.

Humans have been around for 100,000 years and the average period a species lasts on Earth is between eight and ten million years. We are but babies in nappies – a long, long, long way off from maturing as a species.

I think I might be experiencing some apparently deliciously positive existential angst. The great thing is, it makes all of the small things seem really very minute indeed. Don’t sweat the small stuff, eh?

It’s not helping. I still WISH I WAS AT GLASTONBURY.

A river runs through the number 10 bus route

No matter how unfairly treated, debased, belittled, mocked and knocked you sometimes feel, attempt – for just a moment – to find a small nugget of fuzzy warmth somewhere in your heart and once located, rest in it. For, as you may not realise at the time, there is always, and i mean ALWAYS someone who has it worse than you: they are wearing the battered, heavy crown of being unfairly treated, debased, belittled, mocked and knocked. Spare a moment and rest assured: they are officially more ridiculous than you.

Such is the fate of the gentlemen over at the Tyburn Angling Society. An organised, formal, professional sort of a place complete with headed paper and West End address to match, the Society HQ is home to the great River Tyburn Restoration Project – a plan dreamt up by the team of avid anglers who would like to see the 1000 year old ‘lost’ river Tyburn re-emerge and once again flow from north to south in place of some of central London’s most important buildings.

In fact, the proposed ‘demolition zone’ is a wide sash of red neatly etched over a good few £billions worth of real estate. The Tyburn’s course would neatly cut through Oxford Street (once called Tyburn Road), flowing parallel to Regent Street and through Berkeley Square before taking apart Buckingham Palace and gracefully confluencing with the Thames.

Fishing huts would punctuate the paths and parks sandwiching the river – though the provenance of an Oxford Street trout is enough to put me off my dinner. The Tyburn, as it currently stands is a large sewer, dealing with rather more London ‘wild’ life than we imagine.

Aiming a little high perhaps, chaps? Well, they surely must win the prize for unsubdued fantasy, if nothing else – their idea is to ‘swap’ buildings for plaques placed ceremoniously along the proposed river. A nice bench, perhaps, Your Highness?

The men at the TAS may be ridiculed and they may be wearing that tatty crown, but I take my hat off to them – they wear it with pride and with not even a faint, seweragy wiff of irony.

Goodbye, Mr Chips

I’m the proud new owner of a new bottom to my front right tooth.

The chip that went before was horribly sharp, pointy and really idiotic and I am feeling suitably worthy of my expensive new friend.

I haven’t been too active lately on the blog front – work has taken an unexpectadly all-consuming twist and both of our ibook chargers at home have been trodden on and obliterated, so not much in terms of down-time. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have come to the conclusion that I can blame my chipped tooth on the boffs over at Apple Mac and their shoddy workmanship.

Had I devoted Saturday to online time, I may not have headed to Hackney in the evening for a drink or two. Had I not headed to Hackney, I may not have stayed up all night and had I not stayed up all night, I may not have unceremoniously walloped my front teeth into my beer bottle (helped, in no small part by a hefty accidental shove), at dawn.

Those chargers have always had a bad rap. Oh, the clarity of convoluted hindsight…